Coal: Part I

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Full notes at stepchange.show Welcome to the debut episode of Stepchange— a podcast telling the stories of human progress. We unpack the technologies, systems, and infrastructure that shape our world. Coal is the story of a step change —a transformation so profound that it reshaped the course of human history. The rise of coal reshaped economies, societies, and the very way we live. It became the foundation of the Industrial Revolution and powered a new era of progress, but this leap forward came at a tremendous cost. Coal’s story begins with ancient plants that captured sunlight and locked away carbon over millennia. These deposits, buried deep in the Earth, would one day drive empires and…